Sunday, September 4, 2016

The magical lab coat

With her fingers moving quickly, the 5th year PHD
student unbuttoned the white lab coat hanging on the front of a row of coats. She was part of the organizing committee,
getting the long coat ready for the 2nd year PHD student who was now
walking up the stage to receive it from her Program Director. The coat had the blue Hopkins logo, embroidered
along with the name of the student. Behind
her, the stage screen displayed a slide with her brief history, undergraduate
degree in Biomedical Engineering from Duke, now studying cancer dynamics at
Hopkins. As the Program Director helped
the 2nd year student put on her new lab coat, one of her friends let
out a shout, the crowd started to clap, and then she turned around to face them. She was beaming, culmination of all those years
of study, now a scientist.

We were in Hurd Hall, a long and deeply sloped auditorium at
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, walls paneled with dark wood and paintings of
long-gone professors in their regalia. Earlier,
the Dean had welcomed the parents and students.
He had motioned all to stand up, and then asked those who had traveled
farther than a 1000 miles to keep standing.
About two dozen parents and friends remained erect. He then slowly increased the distance
threshold, until the last two pairs of parents standing were recognized: they
had traveled from Egypt and Spain to see their child be “coated”.

The “coating ceremony” is a once a year, end of summer affair
where Hopkins presents a lab coat to the PHD students who have successfully
completed their final exam: the Doctoral Board Oral (DBO). The PHD candidates complete their courses in
their first or second year of study, and then take the DBO, an exam where 5
professors from diverse fields gather to make one last measure of the
student.

It’s a nerve-racking event. The student studies for a month,
knowing who will be on the board but having no idea about the questions that
they will ask. On judgment day, she stands
in front of them and answers questions ranging from mathematics to cellular
biology, anatomy to engineering. Having
taken part in many of these exams, I have often wondered whether I could answer
all the questions that are asked. I try
to remember how I felt when some 25 years ago it was me who stood and puzzled
with the seemingly random questions. I
was scared; knowing that no matter what my previous grades, failure of this
exam meant that I would not be allowed to continue. It meant that I was done, the dream of
becoming a scientist denied. And so I
try to be fair --- it’s quite hard to think while under such pressure, your
life-long dreams on the line.

The students have taken exams all their lives, and making it
this far means that they have excelled in all of them. The DBO is the last exam that they will ever
take. The coating ceremony recognizes
this momentous passage, and with this last hurdle crossed, now a scientist.

The surprising
benefits of wearing a lab coat

Richard Feynman, the 20th century iconic physicist,
had a father who was a uniform salesman.
In his memoirs, he recalls his father reading a newspaper article about
the Pope, and then turning to Richard to say that: “See this man with his fancy
clothes? Underneath that uniform he’s
just a man like you and me.” Richard
learned that uniforms don’t matter. What
matters is the person underneath.

But research in social psychology would suggest otherwise: there is something about the clothes that we wear. Our clothes not only affect the perception of
people that we interact with, but surprisingly, our clothes also affect how we
behave.

Experiments have demonstrated that a woman who wears a
masculine outfit is more likely to get the job following an interview (Forsythe
1990), and a woman who wears a sexy outfit is viewed by interviewer to be less competent
(Glick et al. 2005). So not
surprisingly, the clothes that we wear influence how others perceive us.

However, what we wear also affects our own actions, perhaps
because we are affected by the identity that goes along with the clothing. For example, volunteers who were asked to
wear a large hood or a cape covering their heads were more likely to behave
unkindly, administering electric shocks to others (Zimbardo 1969). In contrast, when volunteers were asked to wear
a nurse’s uniform, they behaved more kindly, less willing to administer those
shocks (Johnson and Downing 1979).

This would suggest that wearing a uniform brings along with
it a framework of stereotypical behavior.
That framework may act as a prior belief about how one is supposed to behave. I wondered, do lab coats have such a power?

Hajo Adam and Adam Glinsky (2012) explored this question at
Northwestern University. In their first
experiment, they recruited 74 undergraduate students and assigned them randomly
to one of 3 groups: a group that was presented with a white lab coat and told
that it was a doctor’s coat and asked to wear it; another group that was
presented with the same coat but told that it was a painter’s coat and asked to
wear it; and a final group that was shown the lab coat on a table but not asked
to wear it. Each volunteer then
performed a task where on each trial they saw a pair of nearly identical pictures
and were told that there were 4 differences in the pictures.

They had to find the differences as quickly as they
could. The measured variable was the
number of differences that they could find.
Each volunteer viewed four pairs of pictures. The students who were told that they were
wearing a doctor’s coat did significantly better than the other two groups.

The authors repeated the experiment with 99 other
undergraduates who were assigned to the same 3 groups, but now they slightly
changed the setup for one of the groups.
For the group that did not wear the coat, they had them sit down so that
the doctor’s coat was directly in front of them. The results of this experiment confirmed that
the group that wore the doctor’s coat again performed better than the other
groups, but the group that had the doctor’s coat in view did better than the
group that wore the painter’s coat.

These results are surprising because the task is a measure
of the ability to focus attention on visual stimuli; something that one might
imagine is independent of the clothing that you are wearing. But attention is a highly “top-down”, cognitive
process that depends greatly on the state of the brain. For an undergraduate, perhaps the physical
experience of wearing a white doctor’s coat moves this state along a positive
aspect of the reward dimension, whereas wearing a white painter’s coat does not.

As I left the coating ceremony, I realized that in addition
to being a lovely occasion to celebrate completion of a milestone, our gathering
had inadvertently provided each student a physical symbol of an ideal. How appropriate that the students would be
wearing the coat just as they are starting on their quest to discover secrets
of nature.

2 comments:

It seems to me like a jhu phd candidacy coronation. I like the “See this man with his fancy clothes? Underneath that uniform he’s just a man like you and me.” as well as the "but surprisingly, our clothes also affect how we behave."Interesting article.

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About Me

I was born in Iran and immigrated to the US at the age of 14. I was educated at Gonzaga University, University of Southern California, and finally MIT. I studied under the mentorship of Prof. Michael Arbib and Prof. Emilio Bizzi. I am currently Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Neuroscience, and the Director of the BME PhD Program at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. I am a neuroscientist who uses mathematics to understand how the brain controls our movements.